It's been interesting to see bitcoin and blockchain migrate from tech infrastructure to the mainstream. I had a chat to an electrician recently who lost an apprentice because they wanted to go 'all in' on trading crypto. Electricians and other tradespeople are in short supply here in the UK and he just couldn't understand why someone would forgo a solid career for something so flakey. He felt he'd lost this apprentice to a cult. Just one anecdote but it's interesting how similar the furor of crypto is to that of religious dogma, with many people claiming prophetic foresight, and going all in on the dogma both to self-rationalize their risk-taking and for FOMO. There is, as well, a lot of economical turbulence in peoples' lives at the moment, meaning they're more likely to turn to gambling and risk-taking.
back
4 comments
> He felt he'd lost this apprentice to a cult.
I think he was right. My criterion for whether someone's in a cult is that eerie feeling talking to them, where they get angry at any challenge, they can never quite seem to explain why they're as invested (metaphorically and literally) as they are, and so forth. It's that sense that they themselves don't know why they do it, and there's a lot of emotional pathology that goes into shutting off from the outside world and protecting their obsession from reality. That absolutely typifies Bitcoin/crypto obsessives I've met.
My best friend was in a famous cult half his life. That's nothing like a cult.
He had unlimited money ($25k a month was nothing) and freedom to do anything he wanted for 15 years. He was never harmed. The organization collapsed as the elders passed away partially due to the rule of no proselytizing so no new members.
edit: they had about $50M split between 6 people near the end. I don't really know why more people don't do this: register a religious organization, require all members to assign all assets and money to the organization, work together for the rest of your life building your wealth tax free and watch how quick your wealth amplifies as you acquire properties and make investments.
Your friend was in an organisation which (a) didn't recruit new members, (b) gave its members total freedom to do whatever they wanted, and (c) gave its members money? And you're calling this organisation a cult?
No offence, but is English your first language? This sounds entirely unrelated to the concept of a cult. I think you're just describing a company, an LLP with a religious focus.
I think you believe a "cult" only means a situation where people are held against their will by crazy religious nuts trying to assert their sovereignty. Those are the only examples the media wants you to know about.
Hearing about a group of people who have successfully implemented small scale communism with a religion involved and they thrived for over 100 years isn't something you want to shout from the rooftops as it would encourage more of this behavior.
That's not a cult, then. Its just an odd religious community.
In contemporary English, cult refers specifically to brainwashy abusive practices that attempt to control every aspect of the person's life and tend not to allow you to leave.
Some groups like the Amish and the ultra-Orthodox Jews in North America live in insular communal societies, but most would not describe them as cults. (Though sometimes the more isolationist groups do get called so, maybe with some cause.)
a cult in the pejorative sense is one in which members exhibit what used to be called "snapping," where the confluence of dogma internalization and pressure to resist out-group messaging effectively disables one's ability to question their in-group messaging.
"that's nothing like a cult" describes situation that is clearly fraud and actually nothing like a cult
Honestly it’s not; the legal definition of a religion is so loose in the US that you can literally have a religion based around being rich bringing you closer to happiness. It would be fully legal and sheltered from taxes under the law (you, however, would have to pay taxes on any distribution from the “church”).
There aren't any distributions if you don't personally own any assets or have any bank accounts -- the "church" pays for it all on your behalf. You also don't fit any legal definition of an employee either.
They sued the federal government decades ago for illegally collecting Social Security taxes and won. It's not fraud.
I don't think your friend's cult experience is the norm.
I believe it is the norm, but nobody talks about the ones that are operating successfully. You only hear about the ones that end in shootouts with the feds.
I would like to subscribe to your cult.
> rule of no proselytizing
> had about $50M split between 6 people near the end
.. are you sure that isn't just a tontine?
Sounds exactly like a tontine to me and I should know. (Founder of https://tontine.com)
That does sound similar except you'd have younger employed members making money to add to the pool of equity and also working on self sustainability like farming to feed the members. Not all members in the aforementioned org lived together past the 1970s or whatever; they often were sent to live and maintain on properties the org owned all around the world.
Yeaaaah this isn’t a cult. Though it’s interesting to learn my grandparents’ “home church” could scale that far. @.@
> famous cult
Can you please share the name?
based on description (famous, 100 years old, pooling financial assets but no proselytizing so it amounts to a tontine with a dualist story attached) sounds like the Shakers or some offshoot.
I think it also highlights the damage of a trend we’ve seen since the 1980s where even normal people see it as something of a failure if you’re not fabulously rich. That’s certainly not novel, of course, but I think it’s accelerated with widespread media representation of wealthy lifestyles as the goal and especially breezing past things like where people started from or whether they flamed out a few years later. There were a lot of different forms (“Bill Gates was a college dropout” fluff or the dotcom millionaires day-traders in the 90s - usually ignoring how many of these guys started wealthy, real estate speculation in the 2000s, the un-Christian beyond parody Prosperity Gospel, ongoing reduction of job security for many industries, etc.) but I think they’ve resulted in an unusually high percentage of people who have both a high expectation of what “normal” looks like and no realistic path to get there.
That’s a ripe field for recruitment into risky gambles like cryptocurrency and the slow burn aspect means it’ll be reinforced by the first rounds who do in fact get wealthy, at least on paper.
I think this shows how bad society is nowdays. Instead of looking at jobs as a career, it now feels like being a slave to the job.
I am lucky enough to do what I love, and have a cache of coins so i don't really need to work anymore. But what would I do all day?
Religion and superstition are terms that came to mind when I started walking there.
It's actually fascinating, neurologically, even if a bit morbidly so.